


The Lights, The Radio

by elle_stone



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen, Suburbia, Summer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-30
Updated: 2018-07-30
Packaged: 2019-06-18 11:28:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15484764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: Even after dark, the season presses close, weighted down with the scent of over-bloomed flowers and overabundant grass, smothering whoever it can reach. He lets his head bang back against the column. A spiraling high spark of static tunnels its way into his ear."So, they have this radio show—""Yeah.""And you want to listen to it?"Bellamy's just being stubborn, is what it is. He just wants to prove himself right: that these two guys he knows are really broadcasting a show out of their house or something, and it’s there if you just tune to the exact right spot on the dial.





	The Lights, The Radio

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jessamurphy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jessamurphy/gifts).



> This fic was written for jessamurphy/jasprjordamn on tumblr, who asked for "jasper/monty and radio-hosting. Can and may include bellamy and murphy too :)” in January. Finally, here it is.

The radio crackles on with a sudden sonic jump, then settles at a high-pitched fizz. A sharp whine of static follows: a flexible shiver of sound that fuzzes out into audio snow. It slides for a moment into a hint of human voice, then out and up into a shaky ear-splitting register again.  

Back down low. Buzzing through the heat-thick air. 

Bellamy crouches down in front of the old relic, his tongue between his teeth, turns the dial slowly to the right as he searches out frequencies. The radio has sat up in his room for so long that it's still dust-streaked. Its speakers look out from either side of the tape deck like round bug-eyes. 

"You'll never find it," Murphy tells him. His voice is too dull to be mocking: this is just an observation, an announcement of the ways of the world, a PSA to describe the edges of the reality of things. He's propped up on the porch railing, leaning back against the corner column and his ankle swinging back, sometimes, and cracking an off-beat against the wooden railing beams. Beyond him, the backyard is velvet dark and deep-space dense. The air is humid and heavy with summer heat. 

Every now and then, lightning bugs flicker. 

"Yeah, I will," Bellamy answers. The radio slips past a scrap of voice again, and Bellamy swears under his breath. 

"Wasn't them," Murphy says. This time he sounds almost sing-song. That's a risk but he knows Bellamy well enough to take it. "They don't exist." 

"Don't be stupid. Of course they exist. I know them." 

Bellamy rocks back on his heels and then lets himself fall back down on his ass. The move looks choreographed, rather than a mistake, and Murphy rolls his eyes and turns his head in the direction of the darkness. (Summer sky's dipping low, the air soft and warm; been waiting a long time now for the rain to return.) Bellamy twists himself around and up onto his knees, grabs the radio, and turns the knob to tune it again, faster this time. The rustling of static fans out loud from the round eye-speakers. 

Sometimes in the quiet pauses between almost-stations, Murphy can hear the invasive chirps of crickets and the loud trill of the cicadas, out in the yard and just beyond his reach. As if they were in the wilderness, surrounded by the unknown shouts and cries of animals—except that this bug-song is so perfectly suburban, he can't even pretend to forget where he is. 

Even after dark, the season presses close, weighted down with the scent of over-bloomed flowers and overabundant grass, smothering whoever it can reach. He lets his head bang back against the column. A spiraling high spark of static tunnels its way into his ear.  

"So, they have this radio show—" 

"Yeah." 

"And you want to listen to it?" 

Bellamy's just being stubborn, is what it is. He just wants to prove himself right: that these two guys he knows are really broadcasting a show out of their house or something, and it’s there if you just tune to the exact right spot on the dial. But whatever. They took the radio out around sunset on a whim and listened to the upbeat '80s pop the local station always plays on Saturday nights, while the light around them shaded into gray and the Blakes' backyard sunk beneath the shadows. Duran Duran rolling out neon-bright across the lawn as the butterflies flitted off to sleep and the moths awoke. But then the hour ended: the sober reality of the ten o’clock news following, dull, and the muted light faded away finally into no light, and no moon. Bellamy flicked the radio off. Murphy pulled at the threads ratting out the edges of the hole in his jeans. 

"Yeah, you got any better ideas?" Bellamy asks, now, and Murphy shrugs. Bellamy's got his back to him, can't see him, and he doesn't care. 

He's considering an answer in words when two isolated syllables 

_—_ _Hello!—_

snap out from the audio fizz. Murphy turns his head. His shoulders square and his back straightens on a sudden alert. The voice is so bright and so friendly, that of a distant traveler, a figure on a tiny boat hailing the shore, that he is almost disappointed when the radio sounds disintegrate into hard shush of incoherence again. Bellamy reaches for the dial but before he can touch it, the frequency adjusts: here is a new voice, a calmer but no less genial voice, grabbing them, reaching out and calling for them, and in its next words it becomes coherent and nearly clear.  

"Hello, Arkadia. Or whoever in Arkadia is listening right now. You're tuned in to W-A-R-K, Ark Radio. This is Monty—" 

"And Jasper, broadcasting from—" 

"A very secret, undisclosed location." 

"That is definitely NOT anyone's garage. We hope you're enjoying this humid _nearly_ -thunderous night. Monty and I have been placing bets as to when it will finally start to rain in these parts and we each keep losing. I'd say we could take this opportunity to widen our pool but this isn't a call-in show." 

"It's more like a show where we just talk into microphones and hope we're not just talking to ourselves." 

"Yeah, we think there's at least a fifty-percent chance this whole set up is a useless piece of junk. But it passes the time, right?" 

“Through what has _got_ to be the longest summer vacation in the history of mankind.” 

“And that’s _with_ the requisite cliché summer jobs." The voice sighs—Jasper's voice if Murphy is keeping them straight in his head, and it's hard because they bounce and bump against each other, an audio circus routine—and the sound sputters like imitation static over the air. "I have this torture-job at the Grand Union, the whole paper-or-plastic deal, and Monty's working for his parents at the flower shop, which—" 

"Is a little bit less terrible but basically requires the same skill set and is boring. Yay us." 

Bellamy leaves the radio where it is, worried perhaps that even the slightest jolt will knock their reception out, but pulls himself up to sit on the porch swing instead of the floor. He plants his feet on the ground and rocks himself back and forth slowly. He shoots Murphy a smirk that reads clearly as _I told you so_. 

"Yeah, so the point is Arkadia doesn't have a ton to offer us right now and—you know those kids who are a little too smart for their own good and should really, _really_ never be left alone to just do whatever because who knows what they might do?" 

A beat of silence, and then Monty's voice, too loud and slightly blurred, like he has his lips right up against his microphone: "We're those kids."  

"Right, and there are two of us and Monty is a tech genius and my dad has a lot of junk lying around the house, so here we are." 

Another pause seeps out over the airwaves, longer this time and unchoreographed. Murphy lets his gaze drift up. He watches the bugs flicking and fluttering around the porch light, swinging in circles on their tiny black wings, drawn to its steady electric hum. 

He considers asking Bellamy just what they're listening to but why bother? That is not a question that can be answered, at least not beyond what he already knows, which is that somewhere out there in the steady electric hum of the suburban streets a couple of kids have kicked their feet up, trying not to let their junkyard radio equipment, their excess of black electric cords, get tangled up in the laces of their scuffed and battered sneakers, the ones they bought back in September, when the coming school year made the whole world feel new, and they're leaning back in their chairs in a breathless, stuffy garage filled with their parents' old junk, their dad's tools or their mom's unused ceramic flower pots, or something, whatever normal kids have in their garages, smelling the clear, sharp, ever-present scent of concrete and gasoline and plastic, maybe with the door open to let in the fresh night air and the cacophony of cicadas that have taken over the whole town, and they're talking. Talking out into the void, wondering if anyone can hear them. 

"So that's how we got here," Jasper says, and clears his throat, splitting the silence in two. "And I admit: it's maybe not as interesting as I thought it would be?" 

"Most of our adventures are like that," Monty adds, low, in a take on a conspiratorial whisper. His voice sounds scratchy and excessively loud through the microphone. 

"It's always the planning that's the best part. Like the time we went UFO hunting." 

"Okay, I was actually going to say that was the exception, though." 

In the next pause, curled and eloquent, Murphy pictures Jasper twisting his face up into incredulous shapes, trying to make Monty laugh with the movement of his eyebrows and the distorted curve of his mouth. He doesn't know what Jasper looks like. But he sounds like the sort of person who'd pull faces a lot. He glances at Bellamy for confirmation, and Bellamy rolls his eyes. 

"Really?" Jasper asks. 

Just remembered he's on the radio, perhaps, not the TV. 

"Yeah! Yeah, okay, so listen—" Monty’s clearly addressing their audience now, his voice peaking, gaining in excitement—"Listen. We had this idea last week that we'd check out those weird lights you're supposed to be able to see sometimes from the woods out past Eligius Park.” 

“Classic Arkadian urban legend,” Jasper adds, with what sounds like a hint of pride. Pride in themselves, perhaps, for finding the best tall tale and piercing its heart. Or pride in Arkadia, for showing a bit of an interesting underbelly, not letting them down with soft, unbroken quiet for once. 

"Do you think those lights are real?" Murphy asks. "I heard Reyes tried to follow them once—" 

Bellamy shushes him. 

Murphy throws him the finger. 

"—And we didn't know what to pack," Monty's saying, "because what if we _did_ find aliens, what would they want? What could we show them?" 

"My opinion was that anything would do because if I were an alien, I'd want to know anything and everything. Like, forget take me to your leader, try take me to your best restaurant—" 

"Or your best fast food place—" 

"Or explain your version of restaurants and fast food because who even knows? You know, if they have that." 

"But we were probably just going to be seeing some vague lights in the sky anyway," Monty picks up. "Realistically." 

"Cause Monty's always so realistic," Jasper cuts in, and Murphy can't tell if he's mocking or not, if this is some inside joke between them, if, out there in their hideout between the garden hose and the boxes of out of season Christmas ornaments, Monty is at this moment shooting him an inscrutable, private look. 

"But that's what Jasper's saying with the whole 'it's more interesting to plan' thing, like if you're not going to plan to run into some aliens, what's even the point of going? Mostly we just brought practical stuff, in the end. Flashlights, compass—" 

"Walkie-talkies, in case we got separated by spooky alien forces—" 

"Batteries, water, food." 

"We had no idea when the lights were most likely to be visible because people just talk about 'the lights over the woods near the park,' which isn't very helpful when you're trying to pick a time to go exploring, so we just went on the night it would be easiest to sneak out of our houses." 

_The lights over the woods near the park._ Yeah. Murphy turns his head toward the yard again, just in time to catch a firefly flashing in the unbroken black. He's never seen them himself, the mysterious lights. And if asked he would never admit he believed, not even a little, not even just a part of him, believing with the bored sincerity of those who have nothing to lose and nothing to gain, either, from belief. He'd rather just say it was nonsense. Most people, when they mention the lights, don't describe them. He's always pictured them as yellow lights, flickering in and out in the distant way-above. Humans on the ground watching them like they watch clouds, drawing shapes and finding meaning in their random, meaningless movements. 

"It's not that far to walk out to Eligius Park, so that's what we did," Monty says. His voice has settled now into the story, and Murphy settles too. He slides his gaze back down to the radio, dusty and small on the floor, bringing far-off voices to them. Bellamy rocks the porch swing back again and it squeaks out one long, high, distracting whine. "And—" He pauses, and Murphy wonders if they've lost the signal again. Two long beats of silence he counts out using his own breath.  

"And you know how this summer has been?" Monty asks. 

He sounds, not uncertain, but yearning, hopeful perhaps that whoever is listening will understand. 

How it's been? 

Cricket sounds and the warm breathless air? The smell of flowers and grass and dirt, sweet and grimy and growing? The whole world lush and dense and still? 

"So green," Monty says. The word _green_ is breathed out with an unbelieving amazement that Murphy has not yet heard in these radio voices, hasn't heard from anyone, in any context, for a long time. "After all those rains a couple weeks ago and then the temperature going up, Arkadia's like a giant greenhouse now and everything is growing. I don't think I really noticed it until we went out to the park and the woods on the other side." 

"It's so true though," Jasper agrees. His voice is quiet too, and lightly awed. "All the trees and bushes seem to have more leaves. There's grass growing up between all the cracks in the sidewalks in town. And over some of the sidewalks. Trees growing up over porches. The colors are stronger and brighter, shades of green I've never noticed before, like someone just turned up the volume on the green." 

The Blakes' backyard like a miniature jungle, losing any manicured edge it used to have. The trees grown so thick and so tall that the neighbors' yards can no longer be seen. The grass taking on the uncontrolled wild fuzz and immense height of wildflower fields. Nature without respect for human limits, bordering on the grotesque.  

"...And plants," Monty's saying, "where I didn't expect them to be. We really noticed it in the park. Grass you could feel around your ankles. Overgrown trees sneaking up on us in the flashlight beams." 

"It didn't feel like Eligius Park anymore. Like, I know this park. Monty and I used to play on the playground, you know, with that creaky old merry-go-round and the black rubber swings—all the time. My dad took me out to the toy boat races on the lake in the summer every year through elementary school. But that night, it was—not sinister—" 

"Wild." 

"An other-world." 

"And even more so in the woods. What we couldn't see with the flashlights, we could feel. We tripped over roots breaking up out of the ground. Thin tree branches reaching out into the path scratched our arms." 

"If we even were on the path," Jasper says, and Monty echoes: 

"If we even were on the path." 

"And it's not that we were scared. I mean, I wasn't—" 

"I wasn't either. But I didn't really feel like we were in Arkadia anymore." 

"Wizard of Oz without the flying monkeys," Jasper says, and laughs, but the sound is dull. It cuts off abruptly, and Murphy feels that silence, always threatening, seeping in around the edges of his hearing again. 

"Because Arkadia is civilization. We've lived here our whole lives so," Monty says. "This is what we know. But we were out in the woods brushing up against leaves and tree trunks and moss and we could have been anywhere. The uncontrolled domain of nature. Or whatever." 

"It was really hot," Jasper remembers. "Even after dark. And sometimes we heard things, rustling, snapping, noises like animals talking, and we didn't know what they were." 

"That's when we got the clearing. It was cooler there and easier to breathe. When we looked up, we could see the sky and the stars like they were in a window, framed by the tops of the trees." 

"It made me feel a bit dizzy." 

"We set down our bags and sat down on the ground, in the grass and the dirt. I remember, it sounds weird now, taking off my shoes." 

"Yeah, because it was so hot, and we'd been walking so long." 

Monty hums, a quiet noise to compete with the cicadas' chirping and trilling. Murphy's closed his eyes, without thinking. 

"I gotta admit, I felt kind of silly," Monty says. "Like we'd gone all this way to see something we'd just heard about, and we didn't even know if the lights would show up that night, or if they'd ever show up, or if they were real." 

"Or if they'd even look like much, if we saw them," Jasper adds. 

"But it was nice out there, anyway, far away from town. Or that's how it felt. Just the woods and the quiet and the sky. We lay back and stared up and I remember there weren't any clouds and just a thin sliver of moon." 

"And it was really quiet. Like the noises of the woods, they existed, but they didn't mean anything. They didn't seem to disturb the silence at all. I was really aware of my own breathing. And of Monty and the stars and not much else." 

"I probably would have been okay with just lying out there for a while and then heading back, even if we didn't see anything else. Even if the light show hadn't started." 

"So they are real," Bellamy says, so low that Murphy almost doesn't hear him. 

Murphy opens his eyes, puts his finger to his lips and shushes Bellamy dramatically, and Bellamy sends the porch swing all the way back and then abruptly forward again, kicking out his leg but not quite reaching Murphy's leg with his foot. 

"We were out there, I don't know.... maybe twenty minutes?" Jasper says. "Honestly could have been a lot longer, I don't really know. At first, I thought it was a plane or something, this single red light making its way across the sky." 

"It definitely wasn't anything natural," Monty adds. "It wasn't a shooting star or something like that. The color was too bright and too red and it was moving too deliberately." 

"But I felt like if it were a plane, it would have been smaller, I guess. And then there were two, and three. All red. Moving together." 

"I thought maybe we were imagining it. We were seeing the same thing but—" 

"Some sort of joint hallucination?" 

"It could happen." 

"It could." 

Murphy tries to picture the lights. The woods feel a long way from the sleepy suburban street where he's sitting, listening, waiting, but still, a part of him is there: surrounded by green, close and small against the uncontrollable riot of nature all around. Even the Blakes' backyard feels like wilderness at this hour, hidden by this particular shade of the dark. 

"And maybe we were," Jasper says. "Maybe the light show was something we made for ourselves. A part of me thought if we really saw something and we couldn't explain it, that it would be frightening. But it wasn't."

"I thought it was kinda beautiful." 

"Yeah. Like distant red fireflies dancing." 

"Maybe that's why they do it, you know?" Monty says. "Why they just fly over us sometimes and never come down. Just to show us something nice." 

"Whoever they are." 

Jasper's voice sounds out distant and low from the speakers: his thoughts given voice but only barely, and already drifting away into words that can never be voiced, and never shared. Afterwards, a long silence, not awkward, fills in the gaps between heartbeats and breaths. Bellamy plants his feet on the ground, and the intermittent metallic whine and wooden squeak of the swing abruptly cuts off into nothing. 

"Unfortunately," Monty's voice breaks in, and Murphy startles upright again, "they never made any sort of contact with us. Which we already knew wasn't going to happen anyway, going in." 

Funny how he sounds disappointed. 

"That's part of why we started up this radio show," Jasper admits. "Just on the off chance we might be able to reach them. Not that that's really possible. Tiny little signal like ours might not even reach all the way through Arkadia. But..." 

"They are close," Monty says, wistful and soft. "Right above us, if what we saw was..." 

"Anything." 

"Anything really at all." 

Murphy leans out over the railing, letting himself balance precariously, his arm curling around the corner column for leverage, and looks out. He tilts back his head and looks up. The sky is clear tonight, too: no clouds, many stars, a half moon. No mysterious lights. Nothing he cannot explain with textbook terms. But then, what does he really know? What does he know about the distances of space? 

"We don't know if we've reached anyone at all," Jasper's saying. "Hi, whoever you are, if we did. I suppose we'll keep talking, anyway. Saturday nights, ten-thirty. For the rest of the summer at least." 

"Or until we get bored," Monty adds. 

Bellamy makes a low sound, a bubble of laughter rising up in his throat. The swing starts creaking an off-beat again. 

"Or until—" The radio shivers with static once more, perhaps the station fading out. The uncoiling tendrils of sound get weaker, quieter, and the night sounds rise up to take their place. 

"Until maybe, someday, someone answers us at last." 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> The title is derived from Ordinary World by Duran Duran, a song I forgot existed until I was scrambling around for a title for this story but hey, it all works out.
> 
> This fic is set in the mid-90s and was subtly influenced by own 90's-era childhood media experiences: WARK and the idea that a couple of teenagers could set up a radio station in the garage is stolen from _The Adventures of Pete and Pete_ and Pete's station WART. Jasper and Monty's alien-contacting idea could have come from anywhere but in fact came from an _Are You Afraid of the Dark_ episode, although in fact the parallels between the two are incredibly slim.
> 
> To write the static sound in the opening of the fic I consulted [this youtube video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wffIdh0CZWs). 
> 
> Thank you for reading! Comments and feedback are always appreciated and replied to. You can also find me on [tumblr](http://kinetic-elaboration.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
